Croatia
What It’s Really Like To Be an Olympian
The Unbearable Weight of World Cup History
To anticipate Argentina versus Germany or Brazil versus Holland is to again hear World Cup history whisper ever more urgently as the tournament approaches its conclusion. The coaches and players will insist that such talk is nonsense; a distraction. The game must be won on the pitch in South Africa. Eleven against eleven. The future scripts are yet to be written. What's past is irrelevant. So said the English, to a man, on the eve of being knocked out by Germany yet again. READ MORE >>
Discontents
Anton Chekhov’s The Duel High Line Pictures No One Knows About Persian Cats IFC Films “My business is to be talented,”Anton Chekhov wrote once to his publisher. He was explaining that his job was not to judge his characters but to vivify them, “to be able to illuminate the characters and speak their language.” A clear instance of this aim is in The Duel, his longest piece of fiction, written in 1891. It arrives now in film form, in English. READ MORE >>
Building Blocs
Books: The Whole Horror
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 By Saul Friedlander (HarperCollins, 870 pp., $39.95) READ MORE >>
With God on Their Sides
The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia by Michael A. Sells (University of California Press, 244 pp., $19.95) The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina: Their Historic Development from the Middle Ages to the Dissolution of Yugoslavia edited by Mark Pinson. (Harvard University Press, 207 pp., $14.95) READ MORE >>
The Speculator
I am acting out a fantasy and so is Eastern Europe. A psychiatrist once told me how dangerous it is to act out fantasies and I am beginning to see what he meant. --George Soros READ MORE >>
